metaRange
Description
metaRange (website coming soon) is an R package that allow you to build an process based species distribution model that can include (basically) arbitrary number of environmental factors, procecess, species and species interactions. The common denominator for all models build with metaRange is that they are grid and population (i.e. not individual) based.
This means that every simulated species consists of a set of
procecess or functions that describe it’s relationship with time,
itself, the abiotic environment and other species. Additional to the
processes the species is described by attributes, which can
be any type of data that can be the basis for or changed by the
procecesses. Each species consits of populations, each of which occupies
one grid cell of the landscape. The processes of all the species are
then executed in each timestep, for each population in the landscape,
based on a user defined priority (i.e. the user can choose which process
of which species should be executed at what time in the sequence/
simulation time step)
A simple example would be a species with the process
reproduction that describes how the species reproduces
during one simulation time step. This process could for example depend
on: the temperature of the environment, the presence of other species
(e.g. as food source), the current population density of the species and
the reproduction rate of the species. This process would therfore most
likely influence an abundance attribute of the species (in
form of a grid/ raster with an abundance value for each population).
Note that neither reproduction nor abundance
are automatically created but have to be defined by the user.
Contributors
Example animation
Process Overview
Publication
tba. (hopefully soon)
Funding
Deutsche Bundesstiftung Umwelt
&
bayklif (Bayerische Netzwerk für Klimaforschung)
